While still a teenager Lee took off for the port city of New Orleans, two hundred miles south. He worked on the docks unloading banana boats from Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, the Windward Islands, and the Ivory Coast. In the evenings he took courses in typesetting, hoping to learn a trade that would reward his strong mind rather than employ his strong back. Deep inside, however, even before he left Mississippi, Lee had felt the tug of the Holy Spirit to become a minister. By moving to New Orleans he had “evaded” the call for several years, he later said, but he finally gave in to the Lord. In the 1930s he returned to Mississippi to accept a pulpit in Belzoni, the seat of Humphreys County.4
Belzoni was home to four or five thousand people, two-thirds of them black, nearly all of whom lived in stark poverty. Among Mississippi’s network of civil rights activists, “Bloody Belzoni” had a reputation as “a real son of a bitch town” where white lawmen policed the color line relentlessly. Whites told a journalist after the Brown decision that “the local peckerwoods” in Belzoni “would shoot down every nigger in town before they would let one, mind you, just one enter a damn white school.”5 The white manager of the local Coca-Cola bottling plant told a reporter for the New Republic, “If my daughter starts going to school with nigras now, by the time she gets to college she won’t think anything of dating one of ’em.” Like interracial dating, black voting was also a self-evident abomination: “This town is seventy percent nigra; if the nigra voted, there’d be nigra candidates in office.”6
Although in 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the “white primary” unconstitutional, white Democrats in Mississippi continued to insist that aspiring black voters could be barred from the Democratic primary as though it were a private club. “I don’t believe that the Negro should be allowed to vote in Democratic primaries,” said Thomas Tubb, the chair of the state Democratic Executive Committee. “The white man founded Mississippi and it ought to remain that way.”7 One banner headline in the Jackson Daily News declared, “Candidates Say Delta Negroes Aren’t Democrats,” which expressed the editors’ most presentable public argument against black voting.8 This was a plain violation of both the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and a U.S. Supreme Court decision that had been in effect for more than a decade. But the government of the United States failed to see that the national honor was at stake in the white South’s open denial of citizens’ voting rights. Only the NAACP and small groups of activists objected. Most Americans, North and South, kept silent.
Those who organized Mississippi’s effort to block blacks from voting did so without shame. The day before the murder of Emmett Till, Thomas Tubb announced that no African American would ever be allowed to vote in Clay County, where he made his home, “but we intend to handle it in a sensible, orderly manner.” Blacks “are better off” not voting, Tubb continued, than being “given a whipping like some of these country boys plan to do.”9 Ten days later Tubb insisted he knew of “no widespread or systematic effort to deny Negroes the voting right,” but a day after that denial he appointed a statewide committee “to study ways of cutting down the numbers of Negro voters.”10
Mississippi had the highest percentage of African Americans in the country and the lowest percentage registered to vote. In the thirteen counties with a population more than 50 percent African American, black people cast a combined total of fourteen votes. In five of those counties, not one African American was a registered voter; three listed one registered African American who never actually voted. In the seven counties with a population more than 60 percent black, African Americans cast a combined total of two votes in 1954.11 Even so, on April 22, 1954, the Mississippi legislature passed a constitutional amendment explicitly designed to keep black people from the polls: it required citizens wishing to vote to submit a written explanation of the state constitution to the registrar, who would determine whether the interpretation was “reasonable.”12 Seven months later, as the first Brown decision rocked the state, Mississippi voters ratified the amendment by a five-to-one margin.13 The Associated Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi, determined to block African American voting at all costs, declared that it was “impossible to estimate the value of this amendment to future peace and domestic tranquility in this state.”14
To reduce the number of black ballots, the Citizens’ Councils had relied mainly on economic pressure, but the message could arrive in considerably starker terms. On July 30, 1955, Caleb Lide, one of the tiny handful of registered voters in Crawford, received an unsigned letter threatening, “Last warning. If you are tired of living, vote and die.”15
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Despite Belzoni’s tough side, Reverend Lee’s hard work and spiritual depth helped him achieve a good life there. A gifted and fiery preacher, Lee eventually became pastor at three small churches.16 “Unlike his brethren,” wrote the renowned black journalist Simeon Booker, “he preached well beyond the range of Bible and Heaven and the Glory Road.”17 He saw nothing eternal about the Jim Crow social order, and apparently his convictions were infectious. In 1936, when he was thirty-two, he married a steady, quiet twenty-one-year-old named Rose. He and Rose ran a brisk printing business out of the rear of the small grocery store they operated in their house at 230 Hayden Street, in the heart of Belzoni’s black community, and Reverend Lee became a leader in the community. “He had a thinking ability better than most of the others,” his wife recalled, “so they came to him.”18
In the early 1950s Dr. T. R. M. Howard recruited Lee as vice president of the Regional Council on Negro Leadership. Lee’s eloquent speeches at RCNL rallies became legend. In one much-lauded address to ten thousand black citizens gathered in Mound Bayou he said, “Pray not for your mom and pop. They’ve gone to heaven. Pray that you can make it through this hell.”19 Booker called Lee “a tan-skinned, stumpy spellbinder” and found his oratory irresistible: “Backslapping the Delta farmers and giving each a sample of his fiery civil rights message, Lee electrified crowds with his down-home dialogue and his sense of political timing.”20 Many of Lee’s listeners came to regard him as the most militant preacher in the Delta.21